GigaOM » Nicole Solis Archives

It’s Crunchies time again! Get your nominations in

Nicole Solis — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 18:00:31 +0000

The movie industry has the Oscars. The music industry has the Grammys. And tech, of course, has the Crunchies.

Once again, GigaOM is cohosting the annual awards show, along with our friends at TechCrunch and VentureBeat, to celebrate the world of startups and technology. And we need your help.

We need you — the founders, VCs, technologists, and all our readers — to help us find the most innovative companies, the savviest investors, the technologies that will actually change our world. Nominations are now open for all 20 categories — including old standbys like Best Overall Startup and VC of the Year as well as new ones like Best Collaborative Consumption Service and Sexiest Enterprise Startup (it’s only an oxymoron if you don’t know the space).

Get your picks in soon. Nominations close at 11:59 pm PT on December 6, 2012. We’ll announce the finalists on January 3, 2013, and open up the final round of voting then. (You’ll find all the rules here.)

Mark it on your calendars:
Thursday, January 31, 2013
7:30pm – 11:30pm
Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco

This year’s categories (and last year’s winners):
Best Technology Achievement (2011: Siri)
Best Collaborative Consumption Service (New for 2012)
Best E-Commerce Application (New for 2012)
Best Mobile Application (2011: Evernote)
Fastest Rising Startup (New for 2012)
Best Content Discovery Application (New for 2012)
Best Design (2011: Path 2.0)
Best Bootstrapped Startup (2011: Imgur)
Sexiest Enterprise Startup (New for 2012)
Best International Startup (2011: Peixe Urbano)
Best Education Startup (New for 2012)
Best Hardware Startup (New for 2012)
Best Time Sink (2011: Words With Friends)
Biggest Social Impact (2011: Twitter)
Angel of the Year (2011: Reid Hoffman)
VC of the Year (2011: Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz)
Founder of the Year (2011: Jack Dorsey)
CEO of the Year (2011: Jeff Weiner)
Best New Startup of 2012 (2011: Pinterest)
Best Overall Startup of 2012 (2011: Dropbox)

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We’re cleaning up the place

Nicole Solis, VP Editorial — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 23:04:08 +0000

If you come to GigaOM on a regular basis, you may notice that we’re doing a little tidying up around here, or specifically, up there. As of today, we’re simplifying our top navigation, removing the Collaboration and Broadband channels. All the archived content from those channels will remain on the site (so your old URLs will still work) and is accessible through our search box and, of course, your search engine of choice. However, we won’t be posting any new content to those channels.

Bringing more focus to the site

These changes reflect our basic editorial mission. When Om started GigaOM, he chose to focus on the most important stories — not necessarily the ones that will garner the highest pageviews, but the ones that have the greatest potential to change technology and how we interact with it. We don’t cover every story in tech news, and we probably never will.

That philosophy has always driven what we cover. Yet, as the site grew to 10 channels, our site’s navigation no longer reflected that focus. We heard from some of our readers that it was a little confusing. We had to agree. We had to simplify.

Our broadband coverage underpins everything else we do on the site because broadband underpins every major development in connected technology. The increasing access to faster, more reliable broadband makes so much of the tech we talk about today — the cloud, big data, mobile apps, etc. — possible.

To understand the future of connected technology, you need to understand broadband. Read the stories Stacey Higginbotham and Kevin Fitchard write, and you will begin to see where technology is heading. We decided that there’s no longer any reason to sequester that content off into its own channel. From now on, our broadband stories will appear on our main GigaOM channel and mobile broadband stories will appear on our Mobile channel.

Similarly, Collaboration no longer made sense as a standalone channel on our site. When we launched this channel as WebWorkerDaily in 2006, increasing broadband speeds and greater access to broadband were rapidly transforming the ways we worked. New terms were being coined as we tried to understand this phenomenon and its participants: “virtual workforce,” “web workers,” “freelance economy.” It was enormously disruptive — both to how work got done and to workers’ lifestyles. WebWorkerDaily was launched to address all of that.

Fast forward six years, and these terms have all but disappeared. This once-disruptive way of working has become a matter of course for many companies in tech and beyond. It’s no longer “web work,” it’s just “work.” Work from home policies are viewed more as a standard offering than a benefit. Nearly every cafe you walk into — well, at least the ones with free Wi-Fi — are filled with people tapping away at their open laptops and taking conference calls on their mobile phones. Most of our readers have at least one coworker who works in a different country or at least a different time zone.

Although we will continue to cover this trend from an enterprise perspective on GigaOM Pro, we will no longer have a dedicated channel on the site. As with Broadband, we will continue to write about these issues — whether it’s a new startup, emerging technology, or trend — on GigaOM, Mobile, or another appropriate channel. Looking back at the past six years of WebWorkerDaily/Collaboration, so many people were instrumental in making this site a reality. There are too many to list here, but I’d especially like to thank editors Simon Mackie, Ann Zelenka, and Judi Sohn and two of our top writers over the past year, Jessica Stillman and Terri Griffith.

And there’s more to come

Think of these small changes as another iteration of GigaOM, following on our expansion into the media industry, New York and Europe earlier this year. But there’s more news to come. We’ll always keep our same editorial focus. Our stellar editorial team — which, in my opinion, is made up of the smartest writers in tech reporting — will continue bringing you intelligent takes on the most important stories in technology, telling you not only what happened today but how it will affect the tech landscape going forward. But stay tuned over the next few months for some exciting announcements about new technologies our team is focusing on and new enhancements to our site.

This post was updated at 4:56 p.m. to thank our fabulous WebWorkerDaily editors from the past six years.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user CarbonNYC

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Hadoop’s new strategy: Pump data in to process, pull it out for privacy

Nicole Solis — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:56:30 +0000

Companies who are concerned with privacy and bandwidth issues, but who want to take advantage of the processing power of Hadoop, are actively pursuing a “pump to Hadoop and pull from Hadoop structure,” according to Hortonworks Chief Product Officer, Ari Zilka, speaking on a Future of Hadoop panel at Structure:Data on Thursday.

James Markarian of Informatica addressed the issue that most Hadoop applications tend to be data-intensive instead of resource-intensive. “The challenge is that the big elephant doesn’t move through the little pipes all that well,” he said. When the processing is colocated in the cloud, it’s no problem. But most companies store their data behind firewalls.

In describing the “pump in, pull out” approach, Zilka added that “Hadoop is forcing the unlocking of data.” Financial companies can’t put all their data in a public cloud, but they can remove credit IDs, passwords, etc. and spill it out to the cloud to do a massive processing job, then pull it back in to remap the data to the personal identifiers.

Hadoop is currently deployed over thousands of commodity boxes, but as the architecture evolves and the size of the data sets increase, the system will have to move toward a monolithic stack. Justin Borgman of Hadapt pointed out ~~that one of the challenges is~~ that the appeal of Hadoop is that you can run it on commodity hardware.

But as Mark Cusack of RainStor said, “It doesn’t make environmental or economic sense to throw more boxes” at the problem. Markarian wondered aloud if there are really exabyte problems that will need to be solved, or if there’s a limit to the size of data that we’ll be working with. Several members of the panel discussed the need for better compression. Right now, compression is a one-size-fits-all solution, Cusack said, but there’s a need for a “much more targeted, tailored compression.” He added, “Compression is a key driver.”

Watch the livestream of Structure:Data here.

Update: This post has been updated to fix a typo.

Watch live streaming video from gigaombigdata at livestream.com

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Structure:Data live coverage

Nicole Solis — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:32:11 +0000

In the year since we launched our inaugural data event, big data has gone through major changes. Data science is no longer something mysterious and out of reach; it’s something that your company is probably putting to use right now (or trying to figure out how to).

Today, at Structure:Data, we’ll look at how companies are transforming their businesses through big data, as well as the latest developments in the tools and technologies.

Our free livestream of the event, sponsored by Thawte and Sybase, begins at 8:25 a.m. ET on Wednesday, March 21 and at 8:55 a.m. ET on Thursday, March 22.

We will be blogging the onstage sessions throughout both days and including all the links in this post. Please join the conversation on Twitter (use the #dataconf hashtag and follow @dataconf).

Live-blogged stories from the event

Wednesday, March 21

Thursday, March 22

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5 things that destroy a company’s value

Marty Wolf, M&A advisor — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:00:16 +0000

Imagine this: You build a tech company with lots of happy customers and an enterprise value of 1.0 times revenue. So you challenge the sales team, the company doubles its top-line revenue and achieves an enterprise value of .75 times revenue. Or less.

This may sound ridiculous. But it happens all the time.

Take a look at Cisco over the last decade. On July 31, 2001, the company’s fiscal year-end sales were $22.3 billion, and its stock traded at $19.22 ($18.94 adjusted). With 61,467,392 shares outstanding, Cisco’s enterprise value was $85.2 billion. On July 31, 2011, Cisco’s year-end sales were $43.2 billion and its stock traded at $15.97 ($15.85 adjusted). With 66,850,160 shares outstanding, Cisco’s enterprise value had fallen to $60.2 billion.

So over the span of 10 years, Cisco’s sales rose nearly 94 percent while its enterprise value actually declined 29 percent.

Cisco is not alone among legacy technology companies. Do the same calculation for any number of them and you’ll get a similar result.

Sales don’t create value, what you do creates value

How can it be that a successful company with seemingly healthy revenue growth can decline in enterprise value? The answer is increasing sales alone rarely translates into value.

Because when it comes to value, what you do matters – the business you’re in, the markets you serve. And while sales growth is important, revenue mix and profitability also matter.

There is one more thing: the enterprise value of your company is based not just on past performance – a fact that Investors in the public market are continually reminded of. To owners of privately held mid-market tech companies, let me remind you: Past performance is no guarantee of your company’s value to a potential acquirer because value is also based on what that company can do with your collection of assets going forward.

That’s one reason why IBM’s sale of its PC division to China-based Lenovo was so successful. It freed capital for IBM to continue its shift from selling low-margin, commodity products to high-value services. Plus it gave IBM better access to the fast-growing Chinese market. At the same time, Lenovo gained the opportunity to expand beyond China and according to Gartner [http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1893523] is the second-largest PC maker in the world. [Note to editor: This report is more current than the one originally included – current for Q4 2011, reported in 1/12.]

In the packaged foods industry, that’s one reason why Procter & Gamble’s sale of its Jif peanut butter and Crisco brands to jelly maker J.M. Smucker & Co. made sense. Both companies were executing on strategic decisions – one to exit a struggling business and the other to expand into complementary businesses.

Now, back to mid-market tech companies. Ask their owners whether they are building their businesses so they can enjoy a certain lifestyle or to create tangible assets with value that can be sold. Chances are they will tell you the latter.

However, most of the owners I meet take daily actions that erode or even destroy value.

Often this hits them in the face like a two-by-four when they decide to sell the company. They look around and see younger companies with lower sales selling for multiples of revenue. Then they discover their companies are only worth a discount to revenue.

I know this firsthand after nearly 15 years of working with buyers and sellers of tech businesses as an M&A advisory to midmarket technology companies in IT outsourcing and managed services. Since 1997, my firm has completed more than 100 transactions in six countries. From that experience, I have created the top five things that destroy value in companies:

1. Opportunistic acquisitions

Let me start by saying this: Most acquisitions don’t work.

Most companies don’t know how to integrate acquisitions, because most companies don’t know what they are actually buying. Even more do not know how to leverage those acquisitions into future value – even when they are part of a strategic growth plan. Think about when HP bought Compaq.

It’s even harder when an acquisition occurs because a company is presented with an unexpected “opportunity,” and management decides it’s just “too good to pass up.” In these situations, most management teams are too intoxicated by the possibilities to see the pitfalls.

They would be well served to take a deep breath and think it through – especially hearing out all the naysayers – before they write a check.

In 2000, AOL bought Time Warner for $162 billion. News of the merger – the largest in corporate history – sent Time Warner’s stock up 39 percent. AOL stock was flat that day. But the deal fizzled out. Nine years later, the two companies split.

On this deal that was “too good to pass up,” both companies should have passed.

2. Growth for the sake of growth

Conventional wisdom is that businesses must grow or die. In reality, there are businesses in every industry and every locale that never grow beyond a certain size. They are usually run by owner/entrepreneurs who want to be their own boss.

But when it comes to creating enterprise value, the “grow or die” conventional wisdom is right. There is a catch, however. Growth simply for the sake of growth is not enough.

Many companies are lured into growing revenue by pouring resources into the markets of today, the now markets. While it may seem smart – and it always seems safe and familiar – it’s actually a high-risk game. Today’s markets, especially in technology, can rapidly give away to new markets. And businesses cannot ignore new markets because that’s where tomorrow’s growth is going to come from.

As hockey great Wayne Gretzky said, “A good hockey player skates to where the puck is. A great hockey player skates to where the puck is going to be.”

A classic example is Sun Microsystems. Once a high-flying Silicon Valley titan – a company known as the hardware supplier to the world’s most demanding Internet companies – the company was hit hard by the bursting of the dotcom bubble. By December 2001 the company’s stock price had dropped to less than $10 a share from its all-time high of around $100 a share. Along with the rest of the industry, Sun spent the next six years or so struggling to regain its stride and by November of 2007, its stock price had reached $20 a share.

At this point, Sun made a fatal mistake. Instead of refocusing the company on software – the future – and especially on making its powerful Solaris operating system available on industry standard, smaller, cheaper hardware – the company stubbornly maintained its allegiance to its own proprietary, high-end hardware.

Two years later, in April 2009 (deal closed January 2010), Oracle acquired Sun in a fire sale for $9.50 a share in a transaction valued at $7.4 billion, net cash and debt, $5.4 billion.

3. Weak balance sheet

Let me state the obvious. Owner/operators creating enterprise value who consider the balance sheet impact before every major business decision is made create stronger, more stable, more valuable businesses.

And those that don’t? They are usually the ones eroding value because they aren’t weighing financial metrics beyond revenue and profitability. They haven’t really thought through whether they have enough working capital or, even more fundamental, cash flow.
Simply put, the marketplace will recognize more value in the company that increases the value of its balance sheet or at least is aware of its implications. This signals sophistication.

That sophistication starts with a kind of clairvoyance. For example, the best time to get money is when you don’t need it. And there are two ways to get money – borrow or raise it from equity investors, typically institutions.

The advantage of borrowing money when you don’t need is that it helps utilize your lines of credit and assets to the fullest. Raising equity funding when you don’t need it makes sense if it’s “smart” money – money from investors who can help you grow.

4. Convoluted ownership structures

For a variety of reasons, some companies have convoluted ownership structures. In fact, show me a family-owned business and chances are I will show you a complicated ownership. Or show me a roll-up company built over time through opportunistic acquisitions where owners came together in shotgun weddings, and chances are I will show you a convoluted ownership.

Regardless of how companies arrive at them, convoluted ownership structures can lead to conflicting goals and squabbling. They can also create complicated voting rights that make it difficult to make decisions in any reasonable time or sometimes even at all.

Once our firm worked with a company whose ownership was divided 49.9-49.9-.02 between three individuals. This created a situation in which the two 49.9 percent owners were forced to constantly lobby the .02 percent owner for support. At one point in time, the company turned down acquisition offers of $50-70 million. Over time, the company’s asset-value diminished to the point of bankruptcy. If one owner had had 51 percent — that is, ownership control – the company would have been sold. Instead, the minority shareholder controlled the company, and they missed their window.

The moral of the story is this: there will almost always be a buyer for your company. It’s up to you to structure ownership so it can be sold.

5. Missing the window on a liquidity event

It’s well understood that acquisition windows of sale opportunities open and close based on economic conditions. It’s also true that they depend on the maturity cycles of industries and market segments.

But here is something many business owners don’t consider: the first acquisition in a market usually realizes the highest valuation.

Why?

As a hypothetical example, if Oracle buys your competitor to leverage a complementary product or service across its sales force as well as partner and customer relationships, then Oracle has made its play in that segment. That reduces the value of all the other companies in that segment.

In fact, our research shows that the first acquisition in a segment can reduce the value of the second by as much as half.

Case in point: One IT services company we sold just 36 months ago at 8 times trailing revenue to an overseas niche buyer now trades at 75 percent revenue. It pays to be first. And once that first mover advantage is gone, it’s gone forever.

As we like to say, “If you snooze, you lose.”

Marty Wolf is Founder and President of Martin Wolf, a leading middle market IT M&A specialist. Since 1997, he has guided buyers and sellers in the IT Services, Business Process Outsourcing, Supply Chain and Software industries through more than 100 transactions, including divestitures of Fortune 500 divisions. Marty also serves as a trusted advisor to CEOs of select IT firms on M&A strategies.

Image courtesy of Flickr user cdsessums

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Watch the 2011 Crunchies live!

Nicole Solis — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:00:31 +0000

Updated. Missed your chance to get a ticket to the sold-out Crunchies? Never fear. We’re hosting the livestream of the entire event right here. Updated Feb. 1, 2012, 4:09 p.m.: Watch the archived video of the event on TechCrunch’s site.

Watch from 7:30 to 9 p.m. today to see what companies, technologies, products and people were chosen by their peers as the most innovative, most exciting and overall best in their field. Will Foursquare win Best Location App for the second year in a row, beating out such buzz-worthy contenders as Grindr, Runkeeper, Uber and Airbnb? And of all the great visionaries nominated — some familiar, such as Jack Dorsey, and some newcomers, such as Leah Busque — who did Crunchies voters choose for Founder of the Year? Will Apple, nominated for both the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S, win for best device or will the popular Galaxy Nexus, much-talked about Kindle Fire or groundbreaking connected-home device Nest take the best gadget award?

And perhaps most importantly, will the 2011 CEO of the year ever be able to top Andrew Mason’s amazing acceptance speech from last year?

The Crunchies will be hosted by Harris Wittels, writer for Parks and Recreation and author of @humblebrag. Katie Fehrenbacher, Om Malik and Colleen Taylor will be presenting, alongside our colleagues from VentureBeat and TechCrunch (our co-hosts for the event) and other members of the tech community, including Jack Dorsey, Kevin Rose, Marissa Mayer, Kevin Systrom, Reid Hoffman and Ron Conway.

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Vote now for the Crunchies!

Nicole Solis — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:00:22 +0000

The Iowa caucuses are over, but we’re facing another important vote this month. After receiving thousands of submissions for the Crunchies nominations, we have our finalists for the annual tech awards. And it’s up to you to vote for the winner.

Siri got a lot of attention from both the mainstream and tech media, but do you think that it deserves best technology achievement over Lytro, NFC, OnLive and Tesla Flat Pack Battery? Some huge updates to social applications — the new new Twitter, Path 2.0 and Facebook Timeline — are battling it out with Google+ and Instagram for best social application. In addition to the familiar categories such as best mobile application and best startup, you can also vote on three new categories: best location app, best cloud service and biggest social impact.

We’re also releasing a new block of tickets. Act fast to make sure you get a seat at the awards show, which will be held on Tuesday, January 31, at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, Calif.

Voting closes Sunday, January 29, at 11:59 PM PST.

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More Crunchies tickets go on sale today

Nicole Solis — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:08:38 +0000

The second batch of 250 tickets to the Crunchies, the annual tech awards show hosted by GigaOM, TechCrunch and VentureBeat, are going on sale right now. The last batch sold out within hours, so act fast if you want to get in on this round of tickets.

The Crunchies, now in its fifth year, highlights the most forward-thinking startups, innovative technologies and best VCs. This year, it will be held on January 31, 2012, in a new venue, Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.

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The new new commerce

Raghav Gupta, BrightCove — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 19:00:38 +0000

With its emphasis on design, Fab.com has become a go-to site for "product porn."

It’s that time of year again — time to log on to our favorite e-commerce sites, that is. They are sure to have another banner year. But it’s been an interesting last few years for a new breed of commerce sites that are gaining millions of users and boatloads of cash. These sites are distinctly different from their predecessors in that they have social, gaming and entertainment elements deeply woven into the user experience. They’re able to do so by leveraging the technologies and social graphs that were but a glimmer in the eye of the first commerce sites.

The first wave of e-commerce was built around the functional. Amazon, CDNow and others succeeded in putting the basic shopping experience online. It was hard enough for sites to translate our mouse clicks into packages that we’d receive, with all of the attendant systems, workflow and business processes that needed to be put into place. It was hard and expensive to get basic e-commerce order and fulfillment, and their attendant business processes, in place. At Live365, we spent more than a year and burnt more than a $1 million in 1999 building an online store to sell CDs. One could have the same front-end functionality today for $99 a month using Shopify. Ouch.

That’s not to say that the first generation e-commerce companies didn’t innovate. CafePress, eBay, Hotwire, Lastminute.com and Priceline, among others, innovated on the business model front, but their sites tended towards the utilitarian, rightly eschewing anything that might distract the user and impact conversion rate.

“Here we are now, entertain us!” — Kurt Cobain

Enter the second wave of e-commerce

Not so the new breed of e-commerce sites. They obviously optimize for conversion. But their core value proposition is based on entertainment, gaming or social. To channel Maslov, now that we’re able to easily buy the stuff we want and need online, we look to fulfill our “higher” needs via commerce: To express ourselves, to identify and connect with one another, to be entertained.

Companies are popping up and getting funded in several categories:

Flash sales: Vente Privee, Rue la la, Gilt, JetSetter and their kin were probably the first to go for high production values in the presentation of their product. This high-gloss veneer combined with the urgency and serendipity of a flash sale clearly struck a nerve. Fab.com is clearly on to something in this arena. As my friend put it, “It’s where people go for a little product porn during their lunch break.”

Crowd-sourced, user-created, demand-led: CafePress and Zazzle are the pioneers in this category. Threadless and its clone, Spreadshirt, have brilliantly built design-oriented communities with a game component. Made.com is taking a different approach by ensuring demand for their products before they get manufactured.

The new window shopping: Open Sky is a platform for celebrities and experts to curate things for us to buy. Others, notably Pinterest, Polyvore and Svpply, are taking the notion of curating to the logical next step by allowing us to roll our own lists of things we love, while FantasyShopper here in the UK, is introducing a game-like element to this.

Story-based commerce: As high-end brands have gone more and more mainstream, we increasingly desire other ways to express ourselves. Products with stories behind them are one way of doing this and Etsy, the platform for artisans, stands tall in this area.

S-commerce: Subscriptions, that is. ShoeDazzle, Birchbox and Trunk Club are high-profile examples of sites taking a subscription approach that gives their subscribers both cost savings and a “story” from the serendipity of what you get in your monthly shipment.

Big brands: Not to be outdone, the luxury brands are increasingly investing in entertaining their consumers online. Victoria Secret, with the annual runway show, is probably the pioneer in this area. But nearly all brands are investing heavily in rich media content including Ralph Lauren, Burberry and Hugo Boss.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of the models and activity in the space (unlike Elizabeth Knopf’s exhaustive analysis on Quora on why e-commerce is such a hot area in VC) but it hopefully gives a glimpse as to the “new new commerce.” It may well become the norm in the years to come as these new sites grow into their own, and as the incumbents respond in kind. We will simply expect our online shopping experience to be social, to be fun or to have beautifully presented products. As we’ve seen in music, there will be different curators in fashion, travel and other categories, from whom we will decide what to buy. Pinteresters, Polyvores and Svpplyers whose influence may well rival that of magazine editors and retailer buyers.

But in fact, the new new commerce isn’t so new: Artistotle is said to have noted that “Man is, by nature a social animal.” He was on to something. In fact, the fear of people and public places, agoraphobia, is literally “fear of the market.” Whether it’s the storytellers spinning yarns in the main market square in Marrakech or the flower sellers on Columbia Road hawking their wares in their Cockney accents or the auctioneer at the county fair, we have socialized and been entertained while shopping for centuries. And as long as we remain a social animal, it’s only natural that we will look for the same fix online

Rags Gupta, based in London, is currently on sabbatical from the online video company Brightcove, where he has been vice president, international. Prior to that, he was an executive at Live365 from 1999 to 2004 and is currently an investor/advisor at 8tracks. Follow him on Twitter: @ragsgupta.

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Crunchies tickets go on sale today

Nicole Solis — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:00:38 +0000

Updated. The first round of 200 tickets to the Crunchies go on sale today at 10 a.m. The Crunchies, the annual tech innovation awards show hosted by GigaOM, TechCrunch and VentureBeat, will be held January 31, 2012, at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.

Update: And the first batch is already sold out. We’ll post an announcement when the next round goes on sale.

After you get your ticket, make sure you nominate your favorite startup, angel investor and VC. Nominations close at midnight tonight. The finalists will be revealed in early January.

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